107 min | R | November 18, 2022 | Searchlight Pictures
Wealthy diners pay a fortune to eat at an exclusive island restaurant run by a celebrity chef. The chef has prepared a tasting menu built around them. Some meals you do not walk away from.
A group of wealthy diners boards a boat to a private island for dinner at Hawthorne, a destination restaurant where reservations cost more than most people earn in a week. Chef Slowik runs the kitchen like a cult and his brigade obeys with military silence. Each course arrives with a lecture, and the lectures grow more menacing as the night proceeds. The film is a satire about what happens when an artist comes to hate the patrons who consume his work. It is also about a server class that has decided to stop serving.
Ralph Fiennes plays Chef Slowik as a man who has hollowed himself out in pursuit of perfection and now wants company in the void. He claps his hands to command the room and the gesture lands like a gunshot. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Margot as the one guest who refuses to play her assigned role, and she reads Slowik faster than anyone else at the table. Nicholas Hoult plays Tyler, a foodie so eager to impress the chef that he misses every warning sign, and Hoult makes the obsequiousness pathetic rather than comic. Janet McTeer plays Lillian, a food critic whose praise destroyed careers, and she eats her own complicity without ever tasting it.
Mark Mylod directs from a script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy that structures the entire film as a tasting menu, with each course announced by a title card and a price. The production design turns the open kitchen into a stage and the diners into an audience that cannot leave. Cinematographer Peter Deming shoots the plated food in clinical overhead inserts that strip away appetite and leave only design. The sound of Slowik’s single clap punctuates the meal like a metronome counting down. The cold precision of the visual language matches the cruelty of the man running the kitchen.
The film works best as a class comedy and falters when it reaches for something larger. Slowik’s contempt for his clientele is specific and funny, and Margot’s outsider status gives the satire a clean point of view. The targets are easy. Tech bros, faded movie stars, corrupt critics, and entitled regulars all get what the film thinks they deserve. The satire entertains without cutting deep, and the ending settles for a clever gesture where a sharper film would draw blood.